Hours later
Shootings at two massage parlors in Atlanta and one in the suburbs Tuesday evening left eight people dead, many of them women of Asian descent, authorities said. A 21-year-old man suspected in the shootings was taken into custody in southwest Georgia hours later after a manhunt, police said.
The attacks began around 5 p.m., when five people were shot at Youngs Asian Massage Parlor in a strip mall near a rural area in Acworth, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Atlanta, Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Capt. Jay Baker said. Two people died at the scene and three were transported to a hospital where two of them also died, Baker said.
…
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said in statement Wednesday that its diplomats in Atlanta have confirmed from police that four of the victims who died were women of Korean descent. The ministry said the office of its Consulate General in Atlanta is trying to confirm the nationality of the women.
The killings came amid a recent wave of attacks against Asian Americans that coincided with the spread of the coronavirus across the United States.
Encouraged by Donald Trump’s insistence on calling it the “China virus,” especially when people begged him not to.
Guess what Trump was doing yesterday.
Surprisingly, this doesn’t seem to be a hate crime against Asians, but women. The perpetrator was living in a 12 Step Rehab facility being treated for “sex addiction.” Highly religious, he cited the Bible and claimed to be removing “temptation.” It also seems that he had visited these massage parlors and agonized over it.
Misogyny, Conservative Christianity, Porn, and obsession, mostly, I think.
Sastra, it sounds like more of that cis-privilege we women have. What a privilege to be murdered for being female.
I’m sick of people right now. I think I’ll go to the zoo and slip in to swim with the otters.
Seems he was claiming ‘sex addiction’ to arresting officers. Was the ‘halfway house’ claiming to treat that? Was his rage pharmaceutically enhanced, or were gun access and religious mania enough on their own?
John,
Julie Bindel tweeted:
But someone pointed out that women aren’t the shopkeepers. They’re the Haribo.
So, a white man claims “sex addiction”. He follows a religiously-based treatment to try to cure himself of it. Then he has “a bad day”, buys a gun, goes to spas (which may or may not be covers for prostitution, but if they are, they probably “employ” trafficked women), and kills eight people, including six Asian women, a demographic that is blamed by many for the current pandemic, and that is stereotyped as overly sexualized. All of which may be a cover story for a more conventional hate crime.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the sheriff’s spokesman who made the “bad day” quote peddled racist covid t-shirts.
Just another day in America.
Somehow, I don’t think the murderer was the one who was having “a bad day.”
What is incredibly frustrating to me is the failure (of the news media and people in general on Twitter) to acknowledge that misogyny was at the heart of this crime, not just racism. And I don’t even think it was primarily racism in this case. I guess it’s probably too complicated, a toxic mess of religion, guns and the sexual objectification of women (and Asian women in particular in this case).
Re #7, I saw a good opinion piece on that point earlier today:
‘It’s race, class and gender together’: Why the Atlanta killings aren’t just about one thing
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/hesse-atlanta-asian-women/2021/03/18/183b3f00-8749-11eb-8a8b-5cf82c3dffe4_story.html
I was reminded of this topic when I saw that there is a big protest planned in Atlanta today with the theme “Stop Asian Hate”. Yes, of course, attacks on Asians are awful, and the number of attacks have increased, but let’s please not forget:
– This guy did not attack Asian men, he attacked Asian women (six of the eight people killed were Asian women);
– He did not attack random Asian people, he attacked, as the WaPo article phrased it, “lower-wage Asian women in a fetishized profession”.
Sure it’s anti-Asian, but it’s misogyny at least as much as it’s anti-Asian.